When we launched WooDojo just over a month ago, a new product was released as our first «WooDojo-Released» product. This product is our WooSidebars plugin.
For those not yet using WooDojo, WooSidebars is a new plugin that has been developed from the ground up to be able to customise the widget areas in a theme, according to a context, without any code… in any theme that contains dynamic widget areas (which, today, is most themes).
WooSidebars version 1.1.0
This week sees WooSidebars evolve with a version 1.1.0 update. This update brings with it several enhancements, including further integration with our popular WooCommerce plugin, currently powering many WordPress online stores. WooSidebars now contains functionality, if WooCommerce is active, to create customised widget areas for each of the WooCommerce pages, specific products, product categories, product tags and products in specific categories or with specific tags. This provides even more granular control over what content is displayed in the widget areas in different areas of your website.
WooSidebars version 1.1.0 also includes automatic updates, meaning this should be the last manual upgrade required for WooSidebars. Further updates and integrations are on the cards for future updates to WooSidebars, so keep an eye on our blog for more information.
WooDojo welcomes a new member to the family… with more on the way
This week, we’ve launched a new feature, downloadable through WooDojo, called «HTML Term Descriptions». This feature transforms the «Description» field displayed when adding or editing categories, tags and other taxonomies into a WYSIWYG editor, allowing for HTML markup to be added to these fields.
This would be displayed, if your theme supports archive descriptions (FYI: many WooThemes themes do support this) on your category, tag or taxonomy archives.
As with all things Woo, we’ve got a bunch of features currently in our development queue, which we’re eager to share with you all. Keep an eye on our blog for more information.
If you’ve got any ideas for WooDojo features, we’re all ears. Please share your ideas with us on our WooIdeas Board.
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Aah! Another tease before Canvas V5 :). Anyways, thanks for this beautiful feature. Can’t wait to try it out but please V5 first 🙁 . I’ve been tracking the v5 news since you posted that it would come in spring 2012, but I am still waiting for that V5 release post to spring up in your blog here.
It’ll be here in due time, appreciate the patience waiting for it thus far! 🙂
The devs are working hard on getting everything ready. It’s getting very close.
Glad to hear it’s just around the corner! We’re really excited for Canvas 5.
Count me in that group too. But then when it’s done, I’ll have a lot of work to do 🙁
Should Canvas users start using this plugin instead of the built in manager?
Or will there be an update migration?
Hey Jarven,
I’d advise moving towards using WooSidebars in place of the Sidebar Manager built into the WooFramework, yes.
We will be looking into developing a migration tool for existing custom sidebars though. For the moment, there are instructions in the «Help» tab on the «Widget Areas» screen on how to migrate your custom sidebars over from the Sidebar Manager to WooSidebars. 🙂
So, we should start using the WooDojo plugins vs the built in woo framework functionalities?
Hi Chris,
I’d advise moving towards doing this, yes.
If we can assist with any queries, please let us know in our forums. 🙂
WOO-hoo 🙂
The archive when downloaded seems to be corrupt.
Cannot be unziped either manually or by installing through dojo?
——–
There was an error downloading WooSidebars. Please try again.
Incompatible Archive. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature
Thanks Oscar. We’ll look further into this.
The issue is most likely slightly outdated data in your WooDojo dashboard, or an issue with the ZIP file on our end.
If you encounter the issue within a few hours (time for the WooDojo dashboard to refresh), please post in our forums and let us know (or pop us an e-mail if you don’t have access ot the paid forums). 🙂
Thanks Oscar. 🙂
I’ll wait a bit and see. 🙂
It happens when downloaded manually from the sidebars pages and extracted through the unarchiver.app on os x as well, so i don’t think it’s related to the dashboard.
Should be fixed currently! I had the same issue when testing it. 😉
I’ve just started using WooDojo on a few sites but haven’t had the need to play with the sidebars element yet – i need to find an excuse to put it through it’s paces 🙂
Needs to be adopted into WordPress core. That’s what I say anyway, it’s that good! 😉
tomorrow next theme release? Please… no more WooCommerce for now. I hope for some beautiful arranged stuff.
Sorry to say, the drop tomorrow will be a let down for you. 😛
LOVE the new functionality of the WooSidebars. Really helpful to be able to add in my calendar pages that uses a plugin – so easy to make sure the sidebars are right now. Now, if you just can add the page hierarchy stuff it would be perfect…..
Sorry, should have said by page hierarchy I meant that you can select every element under a menu to be connected to one sidebar in a single click.
+1
This is awesome.I love the idea of being able to customize widget areas based on e.g product categories. WooCommerce is very powerful and WooSidebars makes it more so 🙂
Cool. Where can i get a free version of this to try out ?
Download link ?
Thanks,
Jimmy
WooSidebars is easily downloaded from within WooDojo, otherwise visit here. 🙂 – http://woocommerce.com/woosidebars/
For existing sites using a WooTheme will the Sidebar manager be updated in future framework and theme versions or will we have to replace the sidebar manager with WooSidebars?
You’ll have to migrate as described in the «Help» tab in the plugin, as we will be developing WooSidebars only going forwards.